Saturday, October 1, 2011

Safari, a web browser developed by Apple, now has version 5 with many new features. Safari cannot be customized easily as Firefox or Chrome but it is a great browser if we know how to use it effectively.

Private Browsing

Similar to other web browsers, we can surf web in private mode with Safari 5. In this mode, no information will be saved. To access to this mode, choose Safari > Menu > Private Browsing.

Download YouTube video using Safari

Usually, to download a video from YouTube, we need to use a third party add-on or software. If you’re using Safari, you can download YouTube video easily via following steps:

- Press Command + Option + A to display Activity window.

- Move to the YouTube tab and find the address having big size.

- Double click on this address to download the video.

You can change the quality of the video in YouTube before downloading. The downloaded video will have the same quality with the video in YouTube.

In default, Safari will open only the Home page when it starts. However, you can open several pages at the same time:

- Create a folder to store bookmarks: go to Bookmark by clicking on the book icon below Back button. Choose “Bookmark bar” in Collections. Click on the empty space and choose “New Folder”. Name it.

- Drag and drop webpages you want to open to this folder.

- Press “Command” + ‘,’ to go to Setting of Safari. Choose General tab, then choose tab folder in “New windows open with” and browse to the folder that you already created above.

- Restart Safari to see the result.

Safari Reader

The Reader in Safari is very good. It can remove unnecessary details and display only the contents of webpages. To activate this function, click on Reader button on the address bar.

Drag the mouse pointer to the bottom of the website, some useful tools, zoom, sending the content, and printing, will display. You can save the content to a PDF file by click on the printing button and choose PDF > Save as PDF.

Always opening new webpages in tabs

Now you can open new webpages in tabs instead of windows. Go to Preferences > Tabs and choose Always in “Open pages in tabs instead of windows”.

Using the address bar for searching

The address bar of Chrome is combined with the search function. If you want to use this feature in Safari, you need to download and use Omnibar extension. Go to https://extensions.apple.com/ , in Categories choose Search Tools and input Omnibar. Then click “Install Now” to install. In default, Omnibar uses a strange search tool, to select another search tool, go to Preferences > Extensions and choose Google, Yahoo, or Bing in “Search by”.

Simulate other web browsers

Some websites are not displayed properly in Safari but in Firefox or Internet Explorer. In this case, you can simulate other browsers in Safari using User Agent function. First, go to Preferences in Safari, choose Advanced and check “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. A new menu “Develop” will display on Menu bar.

Click on menu Develop, choose User Agent. Choose a web browser that you want to use. From now, Safari can have features from the web browser that you chose.